Instrumental and Moral Rationales in Diversity Statements: An Archive Study of Real-World Organizations in the German Context

This study investigates which rationales German organizations use in their diversity statements and to what extent these rationales are related to organizational characteristics, namely profit-orientation, organizational size, and location (i.e., the population size of the headquarters city), as well as to statements’ characteristics, namely length and broadness. The study focuses on the question whether the statements follow a moral (“Diversity is valued for moral reasons”) or instrumental (business-case: “Diversity is valued because it benefits the organization”) rationale for supporting diversity. We studied diversity statements of German organizations that signed the “Charta der Vielfalt”—a political initiative to foster diversity within work and organizational contexts and the German version of the EU Diversity Charter (https://www.charta-der-vielfalt.de/). Between October 2023 and February 2026, 2,699 organization were randomly selected. This corresponds to around 41% of all organizations that had signed the German diversity charter by May 2025. A total of N = 1,463 organizations presented diversity statements on their websites, that is, statements that contain the word “diversity” or any related term. Two independent raters who were blind to the specific research objective assessed the statements’ content. The raters were trained to evaluate the morality and instrumentality of diversity statements. They assessed the extent to which the statements use moral and instrumental diversity rationales using metric as well as categorical items. In addition, the statements’ length and broadness were assessed using the number of words (length) and the mention of diversity categories (broadness). These data allow us to replicate a study by Jansen et al. (2021), which found that for-profit organizations use instrumental diversity rationales more strongly than non-profit organizations in the Dutch context. In addition, we are able to investigate, on an exploratory level, to what extent diversity rationales are related to organizations’ size, the population size of the city where the organization is headquartered, and the length and broadness of the statement.